A Spinster by the Sea Page 3

  Anne had taken supper in the main dining room last evening—showing the flag, according to Helen—but one meal a day in public was enough for Anne.

  “We will wish her ladyship the joy of her new trend,” Anne said, opening her workbasket. “We will also hope her bold idea garners more notice than my little contretemps with Lord Corbett.”

  “He’s heading for Scotland, according to my whist partners.” Helen regarded Anne, who sat on the sofa beneath the windows. “You do not seem upset, my dear.”

  I am relieved. Anne could admit that to Augustus, His Grace of Tindale, who’d been Lord Corbett’s best man. She would never hint as much to Helen.

  “We all grieve differently.”

  That observation seemed to placate Helen, who went to the front door. “Don’t grieve for too long, Anne. That house party has possibilities, even for you. You are still an heiress, and you will add a certain backhanded cachet to Lady Deschamps’s gathering if you appear at a few suppers or card nights. We can get you back on the horse without all of Mayfair looking on. I will see what I can do.”

  Anne rose, her embroidery forgotten. “Helen, you must not meddle. For me to invite myself to a choice gathering of Society’s darlings would be the outside of desperate.”

  “No, it would not. It would be a coup. You must see that.”

  What Anne saw was two weeks of sly looks, knowing smiles, and half-overheard whispers, all of them malicious. She had run that same gamut when the betrothal to Lord Hume had come unraveled, and she had no stomach for such an ordeal now.

  “It’s too soon, Helen. I was engaged to Lord Corbett. I am beyond being smitten with any man, but I was somewhat fond of him and prepared to build a future with him. I cannot simply hand off my morning horse, climb upon my choice for the afternoon, and get back to the hunt field.”

  Helen swirled a green merino wool cloak about her shoulders. “Corbett Hobbs is on the way to Scotland with his chère amie. You not only discard him like a spent mount, you let it be known his gaits were bone-racking, and he shied at puddles. That’s how this is done. Wish me luck at the card table. Mrs. Colonel Farragut is cousin to Lady Deschamps by marriage. A word in the right ear might see you invited to a luncheon, at least.”

  “Do not do this,” Anne said. “I will look desperate, and desperation gives all the worst sorts of men ambitions that bode ill for my composure.” More plainspoken than that, she could not be.

  “Lady Deschamps does not invite the desperate to her gatherings. That’s the beauty of this situation. You won’t be importuned, but you will be an object of curiosity. A perfect place to resume socializing. I’ll see you in time to change for supper.”

  Helen wafted out the door on a swish of green elegance, while Anne wanted to hurl her workbasket through the window.

  No. No. No. If invited to a pity luncheon or a curiosity musicale, she would decline. She had few suitable dresses with her, for one thing, and she had no intention of attaching a man’s interest ever again. No afternoon horses, no following the hounds, no being followed by the hounds.

  What she craved was the peace and majesty of ocean views, the delight of the surf splashing her ankles, the benevolence of sunshine on her closed eyelids. Not a jolly good gallop down the buffet line.

  Anne was still fretting and fuming when she made her way to the beach at two of the clock. Tindale occupied the same rock where they’d sat the previous day, but he’d spread a soft wool blanket, doubled up to four thicknesses.

  He was not an elegant man, but rather, impressive. Substantial, with features more rugged than refined and enough muscle to make any Corinthian envious. The fashion for dandies was languid indifference to life at large unless involved in actual athletic pursuits. Tindale, even sitting still, his gaze upon the sea, could never be mistaken for languid or indifferent.

  “Miss Baxter, good day.” He rose and bowed. “You are punctual.”

  “As are you. You brought us a blanket.” Inane thing to say, but Anne refused to discuss the weather with this man.

  “If we are to devote ourselves to serious discussion of weighty matters, we must have a comfortable perch from which to exchange our profundities.” He offered her his hand, and when Anne sat, he came down immediately beside her. “Also, a rock makes a hard bench, and a lady deserves her comforts.”

  The blanket was soft, and Tindale’s bulk offered protection from a brisk breeze. “How goes the horse auction?”

  “We’re having a bit of drama, though if an event is both predictable and tiresome, can it qualify as drama? Miss Maybelline Carruthers has sent regrets, and Lady Deschamps is in high dudgeon. Miss Carruthers claims a spring cold has laid her low, but her ladyship knows that Maybelline has designs on Lord Andrew Postlebottom—I think that’s his name. Her ladyship has chosen Postlebottom for some goddaughter or niece-by-marriage, and the perfidy of the Carruthers Creature—taking advantage of the field Godmama so graciously thinned for Miss Carruthers in Town—is the subject of much muttering.”

  “It’s Postlebotham, Your Grace.” Though, of course, a former solicitor knew that. “You are relieved that Miss Carruthers is not underfoot?”

  “I am terrified. The unlucky goddaughter or niece-by-marriage from whose clutches Postlebother was snatched will turn her sights on me, the consolation duke. I overheard a pair of chaperones planning strategy last evening. My antecedents are lowly, alas, but ducal enough, and ‘when darkness falls,’ a duke is a duke, no matter how unfashionable his looks might be.”

  “They seek a peer with impressive tailoring, Your Grace, while you boast impressive insights into society’s foibles. The hostesses know you were a solicitor, and solicitors hear all the best secrets. If the chaperones tread warily around you, it’s because they are accustomed to respecting the title rather than respecting the man himself. In your case, they must reckon with both.”

  Tindale was quiet for a moment, while the waves danced along the shoreline, and the breeze teased at his hair.

  “You understand these people,” he said. “I understood them as a lawyer understands difficult clients, not as a duke understands the society he’s expected to favor. How are you faring at the inn?”

  “Not well.” The honesty of Anne’s answer surprised her, but Tindale had asked, and he was owed the truth from her. “My cousin is plotting to see me engaged again, as quickly as possible, and I can’t seem to convince her that three times is the limit of my fortitude.”

  “The first was the ailing youth. Who was the second?”

  “Lord Hume Billingsley. The settlement discussions could not be brought to a satisfactory conclusion. The general conclusion is that I cried off because we would not suit.”

  Tindale shifted to consider her. “He was in debt up to his gold cravat pin, and your aunt and uncle came to their senses in time.”

  “My solicitors brought me to my senses. They sat me down outside my guardians’ hearing and explained the numbers to me. Billingsley’s debts were just shy of staggering because the whole family was trading on his expectations, and his mother…”

  “Gambles,” Tindale finished. “While his father’s a sot. Billingsley’s situation is not to be envied, but neither was it your problem to solve. You did the right thing by walking away, and God knows settlements prove difficult for many a titled family.”

  The solicitors had assured Anne that was so. Many couples, even couples who’d announced their engagements, quietly went their separate ways when nuptial finances proved too complicated to sort out. Anne would have rubbed along well enough with Billingsley himself, but his family would have run through her fortune in very short order.

  And yet, there had been months of talk. In every whisper and aside, Anne had been the villain of the piece. Airs above her station. Doesn’t know her place. Too good for a peer’s heir.

  “I paid off Billingsley’s debts,” Anne said. “I felt sorry for him. He’s not a bad sort. He went on to marry some cit’s daughter, and they had two little boys in quick succession.” The gossips had stopped inflicting reports of Billingsley’s marital bliss on her after that. He’d lost his wife last year to a lung fever, and Anne had sent the requisite note of condolence.

  “You are generous in victory. A fine quality in any general.”

  Anne had felt more like a pawn than a general, but the solicitors were her late father’s lawyers, and their loyalties were to her rather than to Aunt Daphne and Uncle Potter. She had resisted all of Uncle’s demands to switch firms, and Uncle had eventually subsided into grumbling at Anne for being just like her mother.

  “I wanted the whole business dealt with quietly. Generosity and understanding were a way to make that happen.”

  “I hope you will be similarly understanding with me when I tell you what I’ve done.”

  Tindale remained relaxed beside Anne, in so far as sitting right next to a man could communicate such a thing, but a subtle guardedness had crept into his tone.

  “Did you spill punch on somebody’s bodice, Your Grace?”

  “Nothing so clumsy, I hope. Because Miss Carruthers has outwitted Lady Deschamps’s attempt to take her out of the game in Mayfair, the numbers at the house party do not match.”

  If the seawater had risen up to envelop Anne, she could not have felt a more compelling sense of cold.

  “Tindale, you didn’t.”

  “I mentioned that I’d come across a young lady enjoying a seaside respite at the Siren’s Retreat and hinted that you might be persuaded to attend a few events at Godmama’s gathering.”

  “On what possible basis would I allow myself to be persuaded to take a front-row seat at the horse auction? I have no desire to watch a lot of pretty, wealthy young women step all over each other for the privilege of bothering you.”

  “Neither do I,” Tindale said, taking her hand in a warm grip.

  Anne had the sense he wasn’t presuming with that gesture. He was ensuring she could not stalk off down the beach—and keep going all the way to Wales.

  “So persuade me,” Anne said, “and mind you make it sincere so when I laugh in your face, we can content ourselves that your best efforts were inadequate.”

  “I am sincerely, honestly asking you to accept my godmother’s invitations, Anne Baxter, because I need you as I have never needed anybody and hope never to need anybody again.”

  Anne considered the waves chasing the seabirds along the waterline and considered Rose Cottage, so serene and sweet on its little promontory.

  “I will grant you,” she said, “the argument is original.” Men had admitted to needing her money, though the admissions were grudging. They had offered assurances that they would relieve her of the burden of managing her funds, gracious clodpates that they were. “What precisely do you need me for?”

  “Heiress repellent?”

  “I am an heiress.”

  “Then I need you as my bodyguard and friend, Anne Baxter. My chaperone, my conspirator. In return, I offer you a decisive tool for establishing your independence from matchmakers, gossips, and even well-intended cousins.”

  He’d done some research, but then, a former solicitor would. “And how do you propose to effect that miracle?”

  “Simple. The solution occurred to me as I hacked out this morning. I will court you for two weeks with the single-minded devotion of a man who doesn’t know that’s not how polite society goes on. I will be adoring and smitten and the despair of the matchmakers.”

  “And then you will toss me over?” A ducal rejection would certainly be a mark of… dubious distinction. No more talk of getting back on the horse, ever. Anne contemplated a life at Rose Cottage, or its inland equivalent, and the prospect was damnably alluring.

  But to be rejected publicly by Tindale? That would be… hard. Different from the previous farces and disappointments.

  “My dear Miss Baxter, I would never be so foolish as to reject your hand,” Tindale said. “At the conclusion of the house party, when all are expecting an announcement, you will send me packing, and off I shall go. I will be devastated by your rejection, but bear up manfully nonetheless.”

  “Send you packing?” Anne did not know Tindale well, but she liked and respected him. Sending him packing did not follow from that foundation.

  “Of course. I will be seen as the upstart duke who thought he could have the first young lady to catch his eye, the lofty peer who’s taught a public and much-needed lesson in humility. You will be established as a woman who can have—or reject—any man she pleases.”

  The seabirds leaped into the air as a particularly vigorous wave slapped against the shore. Some flapped away to safety on the nearby rocks. An intrepid pair drifted back to the sand and resumed their seabird business.

  From one perspective, Tindale’s plan had all the elements of farce. From another… It could be like that wave. A decisive disruption of the pattern, one that allowed Anne to settle back to the business of her life however she pleased.

  “Your strategy is different,” Anne murmured. “Nobody will expect me to be so… so…”

  “Self-possessed?” Tindale suggested. “Self-assured? More fool them. You’d get something else out of this arrangement.”

  “Freedom?” The word glimmered at the edge of Anne’s ambitions, like a sliver of gilded sunset glimmered over an overcast horizon.

  “Freedom and my eternal gratitude.”

  “Oh, that.” And yet, Anne had the sense Tindale was not making this request lightly.

  A silence stretched while she contemplated his scheme, and the tide came ever closer to their perch. An opportunity like this—to reject a duke—would not come along again. Helen would cease her carping, and Anne need not return to London in disgrace.

  “I will give you my answer tomorrow,” Anne said. “Thank you for another interesting conversation.”

  Tindale walked her to the door of Rose Cottage. When he should have bowed over her hand, he instead kissed her cheek and lingered near long enough to whisper, “Please, Anne.”

  She curtseyed. “Until tomorrow. Shall we say ten of the clock?”

  He bowed and walked away. Anne watched his retreat until he was lost from sight.

  Chapter Three

  “Tindale, have you taken leave of your senses?”

  Augustus was tempted to tell his dear godmama that he had parted from his wits the day he’d learned that a title was to be slung about his neck.

  “You aren’t thinking strategically, my lady,” Augustus replied, the elegant gilt chair creaking beneath him. He was in Godmama’s private parlor, a blue and gold jewel box intended to show off Lady Deschamps’s perfect coloring. “Miss Anne Baxter has gone to ground. Nobody knows where she is, and she is the talk of London. If she turns up at, of all places, your house party, then that gathering becomes the talk of London.”

  Lady Deschamps was referred to as a handsome widow. She was nearing fifty, but looked younger, at least by the time she emerged from her boudoir at midday. She had been more distant than doting as a godparent, but then, Mama had married down.

  Her blond hair was styled in artful braids and loops. Her complexion was as perfect as subtle cosmetics could make it. Her afternoon dress was doubtless a Paris creation, and the gold locket about her neck hung just low enough to draw the eye to the swell of her breasts. She navigated the blue and gold tea service gracefully and occupied her tufted sofa with casual elegance.

  She was what Anne Baxter should aspire to become—exquisitely fashionable—though Augustus hoped Anne could avoid that fate.

  Continue to avoid it.

  “Anne Baxter is out of the question, Tindale. You have no way of knowing this, but Miss Baxter let Lord Hume Billingsley slip through her fingers several years ago, and now Lord Corbett Hobbs has left her standing… Well, you were there.”

  Augustus, as best man, had been left to explain to Anne’s uncle that Lord Corbett had run off with his doxy rather than marry the Baxter heiress. The uncle—to his everlasting disgrace—had reacted as if the insult, while predictable, had been done to him rather than to his niece.

  “I know Lord Corbett Hobbs well, my lady, and I know the woman with whom he has eloped. Lord Corbett will be back in Town within a fortnight, tail between his legs, pockets even more to let. Marie will no more marry him than I’d marry Maybelline Carruthers.”

  A slight vertical line appeared between Lady Deschamps’s perfectly plucked brows, suggesting the Carruthers Creature’s defection had disturbed a deeper game than Augustus had perceived.

  Bloody hell. Anne would have spotted Lady Deschamps’s scheme from across the music room.

  “Maybelline isn’t silly, Augustus, and you were not raised in the same environment as your cousins. Maybelline could be counted on to make allowances accordingly, and she would know how to punish any who dared refuse your invitations. Her mother is among my dearest friends, and you could rely on me to keep your new duchess from putting a foot wrong—not that she would.”

  Maybelline Carruthers was calculating, in other words, and shallow enough to consider a refused invitation a declaration of social war. Moreover, Godmama saw Maybelline as a means of adding a duchess to the collection of women beholden to her matchmaking efforts.

  “Maybelline isn’t here, is she?” Augustus said, rising. “That doesn’t speak well for her willingness to heed your guidance. Anne Baxter and her cousin, by contrast, are biding a mile down the coast at the Siren’s Retreat. You could invite Miss Baxter to a few events, and I will publicly show her my favor, favor you were prepared to steer toward the fair and feckless Maybelline. The Carruthers Creature will rue the day she thought to turn up her nose at your consequence, my lady.”

  Lady Deschamps remained seated, her gaze appraising. “You were Lord Corbett’s best man. Perhaps you feel some responsibility for his decision? Some pity for his jilt?”

  Well, no. One emotion Augustus did not feel for Miss Baxter was pity. Respect, admiration, commiseration, liking, and a few other sentiments best left unacknowledged even in solitude, but not pity.